Who is on my team: building strong teams in interdisciplinary visualization courses

While it seems that interdisciplinary collaboration in a visualization course is (theoretically) a very good idea, the practical implementation of such a course is problematic: in a single semester course students need to find project partners out of a group of students they do not know at all, establish a "common ground" with their new partners and create an expressive and effective solution to a visualization problem. This paper reports on a one semester course given to 48 interdisciplinary students (29 computer science, 14 business information systems, 5 non-technical), the strategies chosen to support interdisciplinary collaboration, and expectations and feedback on the collaboration as experienced by the students.

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